Cloned animals' meat and milk safe, says US

United States regulators have tentatively concluded that milk and meat from cloned animals - such as those being produced commercially in New Zealand - are safe to consume.

The USA Food and Drug Administration's conclusions could eventually clear the way for such products to reach supermarket shelves and for cloning to be widely used to breed livestock.

Agency officials said that after receiving public comments, they hoped, by the middle of next year, to outline their views on how, if at all, cloning would be regulated, including whether food from cloned animals should be labelled.

If the initial conclusion is upheld, labelling would not be needed and there would be little regulation, Stephen Sundlof, director of the agency's Centre for Veterinary Medicine, told the New York Times.

The US has just a few hundred cloned cattle out of a total of about 100 million.

Cloning an animal can cost $30,000 - too expensive to do just for its milk or meat. Instead, the main use would be to make copies of prized animals for breeding many more by conventional means, and products from those animals could enter the food supply.

Waikato cattle genetics company Ambreed New Zealand is already producing clones of top-performing dairy bulls, and has said if Fonterra refuses to accept milk from the offspring of cloned bulls, the company will try to sell the semen overseas.

Any move to allow food from cloned animals or their offspring is expected to face opposition. Some critics say the evidence of safety is not sufficient, and the FDA said its conclusions were based on scanty data, particularly for animals other than cows.

Dolly the sheep, the first clone of an adult mammal, was born in 1996. Since then, cows, pigs and horses, among others, have been cloned.

Some New Zealand scientists have considerable expertise in cloning cattle and sheep.

In June 2001, the FDA asked American cloning companies and farmers to voluntary keep off the market the milk and meat from clones, and from the more conventionally bred offspring of clones, so that it could assess the potential risks.

- NZPA